This connection to Ukraine is one I am making, not the writers of this but this is good reference material that helps highlight sympathetic patterns in the way the Ukraine War has evolved as well.

As russia is unable to bring artillery to bear because of drones and counter battery operations by Ukraine I think the situation will evolve in a way that has some salience with how once ISIS/ISIL transistioned to a traditional ground offensive in the mid 2010s they were punished heavily for it by coalition airpower used in support of ground forces.

This report focuses mostly on how the use of airpower was successful because it was integrated with actually motivated local forces… which yes of course… and let us take a moment here to reflect I doubt russian soldiers are motivated in such a way to defend their section of the front… but the part I am interested in is why this campaign was so much more successful at subduing ISIS/ISIL forces than fighting in the years before? The clue is in what the impact of the campaign was, which was to force ISIL/ISIS to stop concentrating its forces and go back to guerilla and terrorist operations that did not take and hold terrain.

From a military analysis perspective I would say that ISIS/ISIL forces mistook a dominant power at guerilla fighting with the ability to confidently concentrate forces and take and hold terrain. What happened next was a traditional ground offensive that was dismantled by motivated ground troops backed up by proficient use of airpower. The concentrating of forces that was necessary to take and hold terrain deepened their vulnerability to airpower to an existential degree.

This is relevant because while russia still has a lot of air defenses and aircraft, the size of russia along with the heavily attrited condition of its air defenses means that in many ways russian soldiers are beginning to be forced into fighting Ukrainian defenders without serious airpower or artillery to back them up. In this case we are mostly talking about drones and counter drone systems along with traditional anti-air systems, but also fighter jets and helicopters as well.

Russia’s massively overextended, logistically challenged land army is being harassed from the air basically through the entire extent of the theater of war and the friction that creates places the entire system into a state of brittlness where shocks can build and shatter the coherency of the system easily.

Yes the type of “airpower” is different but there are many similar patterns.

This chapter addresses air-ground coordination during the liberation of Iraqi and Syrian territory from ISIS control. Specifically, it focuses on the United States’ and its coalition partners’ use of airpower to provide CAS for troops in contact with enemy forces and to interdict ISIS forces flowing to the front lines. The chapter focuses on these missions (i.e., CAS and interdiction) in support of the close fight rather than addressing the deep fight, in which airpower was used to strike ISIS well behind the FLOT or to target ISIS’s financial resources (e.g., the Tidal Wave II strikes) and logistical networks. Those aspects of air operations are treated in Chapter Five. The role that ISR, DCA, and lift played in enabling airpower is treated in Chapter Six.

At the height of its advance, ISIS controlled territory roughly the size of Great Britain, encompassing dozens of population centers straddling Iraq and Syria. These population centers ranged from villages to Iraq’s second most populous city, Mosul, which had more than 1 million inhabitants prior to ISIS’s assault on it. The coalition military campaign to liberate this territory lasted roughly four and a half years, from late 2014 to early 2019 (see Figure 4.1). Over this period, the coalition conducted nearly 33,000 strikes at more than 100 locations in Iraq and Syria (see Figures 4.2a and 4.2b). Given the length of the campaign and the number of operations, it would be repetitive to cover all clearing operations in this report. Therefore, we focus our narrative on a smaller number of operations that are emblematic of important aspects of air-ground coordination or represent a strategic turning point in the campaign.

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In Phase I of the operation, the introduction of coalition airpower largely halted ISIS’s offensive that threatened to overrun Baghdad, Erbil, and Kobani. But ISIS swiftly learned the lessons of Kobani, and the organization became unwilling to mass forces and attack out of fear of coalition air strikes. ISIS’s only significant gains thereafter occurred when coalition aircraft could not or would not intervene because of bad weather and political constraints. Although this demonstrated the deterrent impact of coalition air strikes, ISIS’s brutality continued as the organization continued to terrorize Iraqi and Syrian citizens under its control and resist partner forces seeking to roll back its territory.

Deep-strike operations helped stress ISIS’s finances and hasten its demise but were ultimately peripheral to the overall strategy. Because eliminating ISIS’s protostate was paramount, territory was the key measure of success in Operation Inherent Resolve, which in turn meant that the close fight was prioritized over the deep fight. The partner-led strategy relegated the U.S. military and the coalition to a supporting role in the war, but, within that, airpower was the United States’ and the coalition’s primary contribution to combat operations.

It is also worth noting that the coalition’s Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish partners needed significant amounts of air support to seize territorial control from ISIS. They could not have defeated ISIS, certainly not in this time frame, without coalition airpower providing intelligence and precise fires. According to one U.S. Army assessment, coalition ground force partners “depend heavily on fires to disperse or attrite enemy forces prior to the seizure of terrain through maneuver,” which “required fire missions in such number as to increase the risk of error or collateral damage.”8

The difference with the above situation is that Ukrainian ground forces have already become proficient at clearing pockets of surrounded russian troops and retaking territory. There are still lessons to be warned here though about the fact that this military dominance at smashing enemy forces that concentrate in order to take and hold territory never translates into political change nor lasting victory by itself…